The New Facebook? Five up-and-coming Websites on the Internet

The amount of websites on the internet grows every minute, but very few of these manage to stand out in the crowd.  It’s difficult to really predict what site will be the next big thing, as there are so many factors that could influence the success of a website.  The following sites are some that may not necessarily be the next giants, but could very well be some of the more popular and interesting websites available.

Klout

Klout is a website that measures a person’s influence over their social network.  It claims to measure how strong your influence is, and what aspects you influence the most, be it food choices or political discussions.  It has however garnered a fair bit of criticism due to a few flaws in its algorithms, but still manages to grow and expand, and should they be able to solve the problems, it could be an incredibly interesting and useful social media tool.

Hipmunk

Planning on catching a plane somewhere anytime soon? Hipmunk is the site you should go.  It was actually co-founded by Steve Huffman, one of the guys who started up Reddit.  It is a search engine specifically for flights, and organises the results in whichever way you want, such as duration, price, or arrival times.  It’s a far more efficient and useful way of finding flights than most alternatives.

Kickstarter

As you’d expect from the name, Kickstarter is designed to help fund creative projects.  The projects vary from things such as films, music and comics, to even some food related projects.  It’s a crowdfunding site, meaning it relies on “pledges” from visitors, giving incentives for certain amounts donated. For example, you could pledge 10 dollars and you’ll get a t shirt, or donate 500 dollars and you’ll get your name credited in the project, as well as a whole bunch of other goodies.

Drupal

Drupal is a free and open sourced content management system, used for creating and running websites. It’s continuing to grow in popularity and is used as the backend system for hundreds of thousands of websites.  It is continually expanding and improving, with substantial updates released almost yearly.  It could very well be one of the most powerful website management systems in a few years.

Quora

Although there are plenty of question and answer websites around, Quora aggregates questions by topics and relies on users to collaborate and provide the best answers to questions. It’s been tipped to become one of the biggest websites over the next few years with a steadily increasing user base.

All of these sites are definitely worth checking out.  Some of them may never take off, but either way they’re really interesting and great for expanding your innovation ideas and also just exploring the depths of the internet a bit more.